“Prof Catherine Hall (UCL) – Building on the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project this paper will explore the role of the slave-owners in making ‘race’. The idea of ‘the negro’, of ‘the slave’ and of ‘the white man’ had to be constructed in the new world of the Atlantic. It was effected through a wide variety of practices – from the selling of African men and women to the making of laws, the discursive construction of racial types and the quotidian doings of the plantation. Drawing on a range of individual and familial stories this paper will argue that making ‘race’ was understood as vital work by the slave-owners of the British Caribbean.”

A GROUP OF CONFEDERATE WOMEN. MISS S. B. C. PRESTON. MISS ISABELLA D. MARTIN. MRS. JEFFERSON DAVIS. MRS. LOUISA S. MCCORD. MRS. FRANCIS W. PICKENS. MRS. DAVID R WILLIAMS. As seen in Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller. Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Wife of James Chesnut, Jr., United States Senator from South Carolina, 1859-1861, and Afterward an Aide to Jefferson Davis and a Brigadier-General in the Confederate Army. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. (Accessed 2015 October 21 on DocSouth – click for item)

On Against the Grain, Stephanie Jones-Rogers (University of California, Berkeley) discusses white women slaveowners in the U.S. South and their role as slave traders:

Although white women have been largely excluded from histories of the domestic U.S. slave trade, they were in fact active participants in the buying and selling of enslaved Blacks. So argues Stephanie Jones-Rogers; she also elucidates the power slave owners had under federal and state law to go into so-called free states to reclaim runaway slaves.

Lisa Lindsay (North Carolina) on her forthcoming biography of James Churchwill Vaughan—whose life provides insights into the bonds of slavery and family and the differing prospects for people of African descent in the 19th-century Atlantic world. Vaughan’s odyssey took him from slavery-ridden South Carolina to Liberia and finally Nigeria, where he was involved in the Yoruba Wars, led a revolt against white racism, and founded not only the first independent Nigerian church but also a family of activists. With guest host, Laura Fair.